Whats in and out in 2020 – Design Trends of This Year!

Have You Checked Out Your Competitors’ Website Lately?

Do you know what are the web design trends? If you haven’t, you probably should as they may have changed their site design. It could even be costing you visitors and qualified leads! In the ideal world, you would keep up with your competitors and get a new website designed. Don’t just go diving into getting a new website designed as you could end up with an outdated, untrendy looking site.

What customers want to see is a website that is trendy, looks fresh, covers all of the key points, and one that is easy for them to navigate. You really need an easy way to convey what you are offering, whether it is products or services, and how they can easily get in contact with you to purchase the product or service. In the ideal world, you would even consider introducing a way that they can even order online.

We have just described in the last paragraph a term that is called “User Experience” or “UX” as it is abbreviated to. In order to have a great UX, you need to have what is called a great “User Interface” or “UI” as it is abbreviated to. UI is a design concept that enables users to have a great UX if it is done well. Each year designers like to put their own take on what a website should look like and how they will theme the design. The styling is usually set by industry-leading designers or design trendsetters who have a lot of influence on other designers.

Let’s See What Was “SO 2019 Design Trends!”

• 2019 Design Trends: Simple & Straightforward – mobile devices (tablets and smartphones) made sure that this design technique took off in 2019. The biggest call for it was “less is more” and mobile data consumption could be kept to a minimum which made sites quicker to load
• 2019 Design Trends: More Images, Less Text – newer techniques like Lazy Loading and the use of Loss and Lossless image compression have helped achieve this without affecting the load times of websites greatly.
• 2019 Design Trends: Videos as backgrounds – While the technique was “SO 2018”, the fact that it took off heavily in 2019 was interesting. ALOT of companies started introducing the use of videos as backgrounds. (Not to brag here, but we even had this on our site in 2017!)
• 2019 Design Trends: The use of “arty-farty” fonts – We saw a huge increase in the use of fonts that were artsy and mixing of fonts that were browser friendly.
• 2019 Design Trends: Bold colors with splashes of text – This is one that we struggled to see how it was trendy but it appeared a lot of people loved using bold colors as a background then splashed little bits of text all over the place. While it worked on the odd occasion there were so many more fails.
• 2019 Design Trends: Introduction of 3D designs and elements – Now over the years, we have seen many bad attempts of 3D on what has traditionally been 2D mediums. Last year 3D finally got some traction and it was looking pretty good.

At the end of the 2019 designs were definitely stronger than that of 2018 and we would dare to say it, more effective in helping to convert people when the design trends were done well. Thankfully we can say that most of the Bold Colours with splashes of text could be on their way out!

Now, What Are The Design Trends for 2020? What’s IN Fashion?

To begin this segment, we are a little hesitant to say that it is going to be a fun year for design. Some of the design trendsetters have been putting some interesting concepts out there! While for some businesses you cannot see massive changes, there are some we hope to see go, hopefully, some of them will stay.

• 2020 Design Trends: 3D is BACK again – So while we have come to love the look of “3D” elements in site designs we are now seeing motion effects being introduced into the 3D elements which are good to see.
• 2020 Design Trends: Abstract Illustrations – Ok, we have to admit, it can look cool. What we have been seeing though on the odd wannabe styled websites is quite dreadful. The successful ones have used great modern images, then the designer has put illustrations over the top of sections of the image to make it blend. Almost comic book style, and for the ones who have done it well, it does look cool!
• 2020 Design Trends: Retro styling – We are sorry to say Retro is still hitting the website design scene and it is hitting it hard. This time it is not so much with fonts. Rather it is with the imagery style. We are seeing greyscale photos taking off, retro-style electronics, and BOLD COLOURS! Admittedly the COLOURS do get users’ attention. Hopefully, though the designers implement them in a way that it doesn’t look tacky.
• 2020 Design Trends: Line Art – VERY COOL concept (hard as hell to try and do yourself if you are not artsy) and so many great applications. We do hope to see this one last as long as it is not overdone this year.
• 2020 Design Trends: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Integration – The topical debate of AI comes in to play on websites this year. The ability for people to be able to browse through sites using voice search interfaces and even automated chat assistants is taking off. Don’t let it put you off of websites altogether. It is going to become the norm and there will always be the need for some Human influence and interaction. Companies cannot ditch the human aspect just yet.

All in all, if you look at what this year has to offer the design world, it is definitely going to be an interesting year for design. We will no doubt see some major flops. We will also see some really cool concepts come to life. Integrating AI is going to have a huge effect on websites and the traffic coming to them. We will see website designs incorporate more and more AI as time progresses but rather than shying away from it, as business owners, we should embrace it. The ability to help people with disabilities interacting with websites, for example, will give you the “legs up” on your competitors that could drastically change your bottom line.

Neil McNulty is the founder and owner of Suncoast Web Solutions. He has over 20 years of experience working with business owners and organizations of various sizes. The areas of Neils experience and expertise include Digital Marketing, Website Development, Website Design, and Website Hosting.